A volcano gave us Frankenstein
A massive eruption in Indonesia in 1815 caused a cold, stormy summer in Switzerland, which kept a group of writers indoors telling ghost stories.
In April 1815 Mount Tambora, on the island of Sumbawa in present-day Indonesia, exploded with a force far greater than Krakatoa. Tens of thousands of people died nearby. The eruption threw sulphur high into the stratosphere, where it formed a haze that cooled the planet.
The next year, 1816, became the “Year Without a Summer”: snow in New England in June, failed harvests and food riots in Europe.
A wet week by Lake Geneva
In June 1816, Lord Byron had rented the Villa Diodati near Geneva. With him were his doctor John Polidori, and nearby were Percy Shelley, 18-year-old Mary Godwin (soon Mary Shelley) and her stepsister Claire Clairmont. Relentless storms kept them indoors. They read German ghost stories, and Byron proposed that each of them write one.
- Mary, after a sleepless night, imagined a student kneeling beside “the thing he had put together”. That became Frankenstein (1818), often called the first science-fiction novel.
- Polidori developed one of Byron’s fragments into The Vampyre (1819), the first modern vampire story in English and an ancestor of Dracula.
- Byron wrote the bleak poem “Darkness”, describing a world in which the sun has gone out.
Bring it up
“Frankenstein and the modern vampire story were both born in the same week, because a volcano in Indonesia ruined a Swiss summer.”
Follow the thread
- RelatedThe first computer programmer was a poet’s daughter Lord Byron, who proposed the ghost-story contest, was Ada Lovelace’s father. She was a baby that summer.
- RelatedWhy the sky is blue, and not violet Volcanic aerosols scatter light and produced vivid sunsets across Europe in the following years.
